Inside The Wharton-INSEAD Wall Street Alumni's Secret Formula To Redefining Investments in India

By Nivi Srivastava

Taponeel Mukherjee sitting in Citi Tokyo's trading floor in the Shin-Marunouchi Building overlooking the iconic Tokyo Station, trading Yen derivatives worth Trillions of Yen, and Poornima Vardhan sitting at UBS Investment Bank's office at 299 Park Avenue overlooking the legendary Grand Central Station in New York advising corporations on Multi-Billion Dollar deals were never short on money making ideas, conviction and market-beating returns.

For Poornima and Taponeel, working with the elite of the financial world, 11,000 kilometres apart, the greatest trade of the 21st Century was not lost on them. The trade was "India". India was at the cusp of growth that comes but once in the history of nations.

In their quest for investing in India, Poornima and Taponeel have codified the method to systematically identify superior investment returns into "AltG's Proprietary Exponential SucceX Formula", APEX Formula. The APEX Formula synthesises and combines over 75,000 hours of research and primary data from over 12,000 points through an "Investor-Operator" lens allowing AltG to embrace mega-themes and generate differentiated ideas that help their clients generate high returns per unit of risk.

The formula is the result of Poornima and Taponeel's careers as they returned to India and their penchant for business. Poornima built a retail business across the length and breadth of India in over 50 cities to tap into the single biggest opportunity she saw in India, The Indian consumer market. Poornima ran a vertically integrated enterprise from manufacturing to general trade distribution. Over the course of 5 years, she saw the in-depth workings of manufacturing, warehousing, logistics and retail distribution. This wasn't Poornima's first foray into Indian business. She'd provided turnkey solutions for two regional airline businesses set up in India before heading off to Wharton at 22.

Taponeel spent over 7 years across 3 different countries on 2 continents and two bulge bracket investment banks, getting extensive experience across multiple asset classes. He invested and traded billions of dollars in structured credit derivatives, loans, interest rate derivatives, foreign exchange, and asset-liability products. But Taponeel had bigger plans. He wished to combine his knowledge of complex capital structure plays, balance sheets, and financial assets with Strategy and Operations. Taponeel exactly knew where he could do so and went to INSEAD, the mecca of strategy and operations. He spent hundreds of hours at INSEAD honing his financial knowledge and applying it to the operations and strategy of a wide range of businesses. Taponeel adds, "I was focusing on really understanding the drivers of the left-hand side of the balance sheet and seeing how my understanding of the right-hand side could add value".

After INSEAD, Taponeel returned to India and ran a firm focused on Tactical Opportunities in Indian real estate, healthcare, infrastructure, and financial services, advising and co-investing with investors. He worked on retail turnarounds and growth, hospitals on better balance-sheet management, cable businesses on pan-India distribution, and real estate projects. He applied his extensive knowledge of capital structure and strategy to bring in-depth capital allocation skills to a wide range of businesses.

As Poornima points out, "We got an extensive understanding of the operating machine across a wide variety of asset classes, markets and industries while keeping our financier hat on". Taponeel adds, "How many teams in the world have had the opportunity to study across 4 countries, work in 3 different continents, trade a 100 Billion Yen cross-currency basis swap, structure a Multi-Billion dollar M&A transaction, set up regional airline businesses, build general trade distribution across 50,000 retail points in India, advice corporates on over-capitalised balance sheets and have the skills to run mega-scale manufacturing units? The answer would be few, if any, distinguishing us and giving us a distinct advantage."

As businesses grew, Poornima and Taponeel had one question; with their diverse experiences, they were investing their private capital, but they wondered how to take their intellect, skills and understanding and allow other investors to participate in the "India Story” using their systems based upon financial analysis, operational understanding and primary market data?

"The APEX Formula is the synthesis of our deep financial expertise, exceptional operational understanding, and extensive local market knowledge," says Poornima. She adds, "It's useful to any institution looking to invest in and understand Indian businesses. Our customers include public equity investors, private equity firms, CEOs, and consulting firms. The APEX Formula removes complexity to provide our customers with the speed and intelligence they need to create excess return with low risk through a differentiated method or understand a business from the inside out."

The APEX Formula connects the present to the future by mapping the potential paths the equity component may take. As Taponeel points out, "it's not what the business is doing today that matters but what the business is going to be doing in 5 years from now and how much Free Cash Flow will it generate". With India poised to become the world's largest investment destination over the next two decades, Poornima and Taponeel's Apex formula is Advantage India.